Villaging is the way

Parenting and teaching clues from village ways of life

The best part of college for me wasn’t the classes. It wasn’t the freedom—though I loved that. One thing stood out then and stands out even more clearly now: college was the best experience of living in community I’ve ever had.

It started off a bit inauspiciously. I was placed in a quad dorm room at the farthest edge of campus, with two reasonable roommates but a third who became addicted to alcohol and possibly drugs and developed violent feelings toward me. It got dicey for a little while. But then in my sophomore year, one of those (reasonable) roommates found a 4-bedroom apartment off campus, and invited me and a few others to join him.

That apartment became the center of my social world for the next three years. We hosted countless gatherings, a few of the drunken sort you would imagine, but most to simply have dinner with friends, or play music together, watch movies, or talk until late in the night. The apartment became the hub for 10+ close friends, some of whom even had keys to it despite not living there. We became so close that even now, 20+ years after graduation, we have “apartment reunions”, and several of us see each other regularly.

Fast forward to now. (And I promise this will relate to parenting and teaching — hold tight!)

In a reasonable world, that community I experienced in college would have stayed mostly intact as we got older, and when some of us chose to become parents, we would bring those kids into the warm web of adult relationships that had been developed for many years. Those kids would know all the others as aunts and uncles, would feel comfortable hanging out with them, with babysitting covered by friends, and communal gatherings happening informally all the time. You know, the way humans have raised their young since probably the dawn of time.

Looks like a decent spot for a village…

Except…it didn’t happen like that. We scattered. And now all in our 40s and raising kids, nearly all of us are in single family, mostly suburban homes. Few if any have a very close community physically around them. Some of us live in driving distance, but it can take weeks to schedule a hangout for either the adults or the kids. From remarkable closeness, we’ve arrived at remarkable isolation.

And in that relative isolation, something strange appeared: the story that parenting is exceptionally hard. Incredibly meaningful, yes. But also searingly hard. The story is so common that it seems as obvious as the air. But…what if this story is an artifact of how we live?

A task that used to be shared among community — childrearing — has now been placed squarely on one or two humans, who attempt to do superhuman things to meet their kids’ needs. As if even the greatest two humans in the world could ever be enough! And much the same could be said of schools. One single teacher in elementary, or a handful in middle and high school, are put in the same impossible-hero position — supposed to meet a vast range of needs, and not just in one or two children but in 20 or 30.

My old apartment mates and I laugh about it sometimes — we knew we had it good back in college, but we didn’t know the half of it. How rare and how sweet that community was!

But enough nostalgia. I know too many parents for whom full-time work and non-communal parenting completely exhausts them (with all the impact you would imagine on their kids). And too many teachers with similar stress, working as the only adult in the room, with schedules too hectic to spend quality time with colleagues or to recharge themselves. There has to be a better way. What if we looked back at the human history of village living, and tried to bring a few ideas into the modern era?

On Villaging

Permit me to tap your imagination for a moment. Imagine that you live in a small, walkable community. It’s safe, in part because kids are all over the place. They’re playing in the parks and fields, hanging out in various buildings and workplaces, talking in coffeeshops and the like. Adults are present, there is a continual background level of watching going on, but they aren’t controlling or managing the kids at all times. The whole community believes that these are our kids.

Adults still have work to do, and they’re off doing it — someone is working at the café, those folks over there are on a construction crew, a police officer is walking by, and a bunch of people are in buildings working with computers, offering services, etc. Only in this village, kids are welcome in most of these places. They can enter if they agree to follow the rules of that place. They might even ask to help.

In a village like this, when we create a general-purpose learning space — call it a school if you want — it does not have to be the place where kids are forced to attend, where teachers spend most of their energy on classroom management because large groups are all pushed to learn the same thing at the same speed. Schools don’t have to be daycares. Rather, people come together to learn when all have given consent, both the learners and the teachers. Adults can work without purchasing childcare, because the village as a whole provides that function. Learning happens with choice and agency.

In a village like this, parenting does not have to be an all-consuming task. You don’t need to book a babysitter weeks in advance, and spend a small fortune, to go out for a date night with your partner. You can enjoy the ease of seeing your kids playing with others on the weekend, while you chat with other parents or even go do something completely unrelated. Your kids get to see many kinds of adults, different parenting styles, a variety of hobbies and jobs and interests, and probably appreciate you a bit more as a result.

OK, pause the simulation here.

I know, I know. It’s naïve in a trillion ways. I’m not intending to say that villages are inherently (or ever) utopias. There are lots of good reasons why people left this mode of living — seeking economic opportunity, or wanting to avoid conformity pressures, the weight of family reputation, the lack of privacy, etc. I’m not actually proposing that we attempt to go back to village life.

But I am suggesting that by understanding what villages do well, we can extract some ideas, tinker with them a bit, and maybe fit them into modern life. I’m interested in how we feel more time-rich, make parenting easier, allow learning to be consensual, and most of all, how we help kids grow up feeling more connected and able to act on their natural learning impulse, also known as play.

So let’s get practical

How exactly could some of the benefits of a village be woven into our modern lives? Here are three ideas for parents and three for teachers. And I would love to see other ideas in the comments.

1. The no-planning gather. To me, one of the most frustrating aspects of non-communal living is how much work it takes to see someone. None of my kids know what it’s like to simply walk to the park and find people to play with there. Seeing a friend often means waiting for a few weekends from now when all the grown-ups are available to facilitate it.

   
   So I’d suggest that ground zero for the villaging idea is, simply, a regular gathering time and place, familiar and easy, requiring zero planning. What if Saturdays afternoons were communal time, in the same place every time, for our virtual village spread across a city or suburb — call it community beach day, or a village pop-up in the park, or a regular hangout at someone’s home? What if a good portion of your village-of-choice could be found reliably there every time? It sounds almost too basic to say, and yet, it would represent major progress.
   

2. Co-sitting. Move over, babysitters. As much as I am deeply grateful for you, I would love to make babysitting less necessary. Could we invent a new word called co-sitting, and have it become thoroughly normal for our friends that kids are gathered up in one house for an evening so the other parents can go on a date night, go to a concert, etc?
   

3. Skills Exchange. OK we’re going up a level here, a bit more effort and planning, but I promise it will be worth it. What if the people in this virtual village had a simple organizing tool — say a google sheet — and were invited to note down their hobbies, passions, and professional areas of skill? This could include kids too. Then there could be an “Asks & Offers” section, or maybe it’s an email group. Say a 12 year old really wants to learn how to code, and someone in the community lists that as a skill. That makes it a touch more likely that they feel comfortable asking. Or say an adult wants to make an offer — perhaps they love camping and would be happy to take others with them — that could be sent out casually as well, and those interested would join. This could also become a mini version of the Open Door Days that I wrote about earlier, inviting kids into workplaces with freedom to explore and be curious.

What about in schools?

Just as parents end up isolated, trying to be everything for their kids, and perhaps dealing with the behavior challenges that can come from “cabin fever” inside our nuclear-family-boxes, teachers face similar challenges in classrooms. Trying to meet so many students’ needs as one solo heroic adult. Attempting to keep our energy high and our dance nimble, despite having few adults to connect with in a typical day. How could village ideas apply here?

1. Make the walls more porous. Schools become little islands unto themselves, separated from the rich, vibrant, naturally enticing learning that happens all around a community. How could we build some bridges? I’ve written about different forms of this, but it can be as simple as inviting a guest speaker in (even by Zoom) to anchor a unit with their real-life experience of the questions or skills at hand. For adolescents, having an outside expert be part of the assessment process can significantly improve motivation and the quality of their work. And when possible, getting out on field trips to see adults in action, whether that’s in a workplace, or as artists, or in volunteering can have a profound impact on students. I’ve seen schools that focus their parent engagement on one request — can you be a bridge for our students to the world beyond school? — with the result of dozens of invitations to fascinating workplaces, guest speakers, and more.

2. More mash-ups. Teachers out there, is there a colleague in your building who you would have a blast co-teaching with, but haven’t had the chance? I’m guessing there is. And I would further bet that the fun you would have co-teaching with them would be felt by the students in ways that activate their learning. This could be as simple as a guest visit from a fellow teacher for a day. It could be co-hosting a club or elective together. Or even somehow engineering the schedule to co-teach parts of a project, coming together for key moments as two classes. Complicated, sure. But when it unlocks your creativity and playfulness, it benefits everyone.

3. More student leadership. Our society under-estimates kids, often dramatically. Even with a pretty rosy sense of what kids can do, I am often reminded that I’ve assumed too little of them. For example, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been shocked in witnessing middle-school peer mediators in action. Tackling sensitive and charged social conflicts with remarkable maturity and wisdom, sometimes with zero adult involvement. So clearly, one part of the school village has not been fully tapped — and ironically that part is the students themselves! At Millennium School, when I ran the peer mediation club, I would estimate that 50% of all student conflicts (and this being a middle school, where social learning is the primary learning edge, there were many) were handled entirely by peer mediators, with nothing required of adults. Immense time saved for the adults, and all the benefits of trust, responsibility and practice for the students.

Who’s with me?

I think back to my college experience of community pretty often. It’s not that I’m wishing to be in college again. It’s that I want to be more connected. For reasons that many researchers have documented (the book Bowling Alone is a good start), our society has stumbled into a mode of disconnection. Among many consequences, it makes parenting exponentially harder. It deprives kids of freedom, play, and meaningful learning from other adults. And it makes teaching an even harder and more burnout-prone profession.

Frankly, I’m done with it.

Without necessarily leaving our nuclear-family-boxes (yet), or our school-islands (yet), what if we took some of the ideas above and created small village family networks? These would not be actual villages, but could begin by linking people in a neighborhood or town — I’m thinking 50-100 people max, based on my experiences with optimal school community sizes.

It could operate on a simple set of agreements made among the members. For example, that we do our best to show up to the regular gathering time. That we post on the Skills Exchange, monitor the Asks & Offers, and perhaps make at least one “Offer” each of a skill or hobby. And to the extent possible, that we treat all the kids in the network as our extended family.

I’m ready for this change. I want to raise kids in more communal ways. And as an educator, I want to create schools where the adults don’t become exhausted. Better yet, I want to create schools where kids can have real consent to be taught, because school is not doubling as daycare.

Connectedness is a fundamental element in human happiness. And the variety that any healthy community offers is necessary to discover our passions and how we each contribute. Perhaps with a bit of intentionality — and who would be more motivated than parents and teachers to activate a community’s help? — we can restore some of our connectedness. Even if we can’t move to a village, let’s make villaging a way of life.

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In Other News…

My new book, Challenge Accepted: 50 Adventures to Make Middle School Awesome, is getting very close to launch! I just sent it to the printer for its first pre-release test prints. We’re on track toward a mid-August publication date. I can’t wait to share it with you all!

For new readers, this book is a set of hands-on, real-world adventures that middle schoolers can choose for themselves, leading them to discover more of their strengths, have a blast with friends, and connect more to the wider world around them. Everything from going geocaching to starting their own microbusiness.

I was thrilled to receive an endorsement for it from Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn, whose work is a major inspiration. He wrote: "Buy this book for every middle schooler, or about-to-be middle schooler you know. It just might provide the spark that turns what can be difficult years into years of awesome adventure and growth.”